Bilateral trade with CEE countries accelerates under B&R

Li Daokui, an economist with Tsinghua University, forecasted that Chinese economy will pick up speed in 2018 and this will bolster rapid expansion of bilateral cooperation and investment between China and Europe when he addressed a forum on July 18.

At the same time, different from the past practice of simply acquiring resource enterprises, China’s economic structure has been upgrading in a way of entering the countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, said Li, adding that China has tried to know these countries’ genuine demands and then worked together on development and construction so as to draw strengths from each other.

Statistics showed that China’s total trade volume with countries along the Belt and Road surpassed US$3.0 trillion from 2014 to 2016. Chinese enterprises established 56 economic and trade cooperation zones in more than 20 countries. This positive trend has encouraged the trade volume of China and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to surge all the way to US$58.6 billion in 2016, up 4.3 percent year on year, of which the exports of CEE countries to China have increased by 6.1 percent.

Czech, as an important country along the Belt and Road, has emerged as a key pass for Chinese enterprises entering Europe. Last year, China and Czech have made great strides in trade, finance, education and healthcare under the context of the “China-CEE 16+1 mechanism.” So far, China has grown to be the third biggest trading partner of Czech while Czech has become the second biggest trading partner of China within the CEE countries. China-Czech trade volume has exceeded US$11 billion for the second consecutive year, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the total trade volume between China and 16 CEE countries.

China and CEE countries have reached extensive consensuses and the key is to transform them into practical outcomes as soon as possible. With regards to cooperation in real economy, the focus will be placed on promoting production capacity cooperation on the basis of manufacturing, developing economic and trade cooperation zones and setting up agricultural product processing bases in a bid to further promote investment, concentrate industries and increase employment.

In terms of financial cooperation, the mutual establishment of branches of financial institutions will be supported and efforts will be made to back the sound function of Sino-CEE Finance Holding Co., Ltd. and China-CEE Fund. At the same time, Silk Road Fund and multilateral financial institutions will be encouraged to provide financial support to the projects under the “16+1 mechanism.”